KC-135 Miscellaneous Shop always prepared

by Mike W. Ray
Tinker Public Affairs

8/3/2012 - TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla.  -- Mechanics in the KC-135 Miscellaneous Shop in Bldg. 9001 have to be prepared to work almost any aircraft part.

Main landing gear doors, hatches, wheel well fairings, cove lip doors, and in-flight refueling doors are just a few of the many Management of Items Subject to Repair end items repaired by shop employees.

Programmed Depot Maintenance balance panels, hatches and access doors "have to be completed in a timely manner to get back to the aircraft as soon as possible," Supervisor Debra Riley said.

In addition, T-jobs and new MISTR workloads are routed through the shop, which is in the 551st Commodities Maintenance Squadron.

Most of these end items have outlived PDM repairs, Riley said.

Consequently, she said, "A lot of the end items are coming through the shop as MISTR items that require a full overhaul."

Because of the "extreme extent" of the overhauls, most items have to be worked in a fixture "to maintain the original integrity so they will fit on any KC-135 aircraft," Riley said.

The two dozen employees in the shop work on approximately 100 different end items, Assistant Supervisor Fredie Green said.The mechanics don't get bored constantly working the same end item.

"When they finish working on one end item, they could be working whatever is hot next," Green said.

After overhauling a main landing gear door, for instance, a mechanic in the Miscellaneous Shop might need to overhaul an escape hatch or a sailboat fairing.

Some of the miscellaneous end items can be repaired within a week to 10 days, while bigger items may take two to three weeks to complete, Green said.

The shop's mechanics are skilled at reading blueprints and work closely with engineers to accomplish the overhaul of the many different end items, Riley said.

The KC-135 Miscellaneous Shop receives most of its repair parts from the Defense Logistics Agency, she said, "but if we cannot get the parts and we have the capability to make the part ourselves, we will."

The shop maintains a large variety of bench stock items "so we are prepared to work anything that comes through the door," Riley said.